This Southern California solar farm is using retired EV batteries for storing the power and then send to the grid when needed. This way the retired batteries can extend their usefulness for several…::A Southern California company is showing how repurposing EV batteries for stationary storage can extend their usefulness for several years.
That’s actually an ingenious idea I hadn’t thought about. How much cheaper are these batteries once they’ve been retired? Would this be a viable option for someone running solar at home, and wanting to store the power for later use, or is a home battery still the better option?
I thought I read that this was a plan Tesla had to repurpose the car batteries into power walls for home consumers. Not sure that ever ended up happening but great to see the retired car batteries given a second life
It’s the same cells inside both batteries. The difference is that the used EV car battery will store less power per volume since it’s worn out. It is a wonderful idea. A solar farm doesn’t care as much about volume and weight as a car does. For a home it would be fine as long as you’re trying to squeeze every inch cube of your property.
Im not 100% sure how the batteries are constructed from all of the cells (and I know it depends on the model), but the re-using process can work a lot better than just pulling out the battery and popping it down. EV batteries are in the range of hundreds of volts, but the cells themselves are about 4 volts. It’s my understanding that the battery as a whole doesn’t uniformly degrade, but you might have individual cells that degrade. If 1 cell in a chain of 10 goes bad, that chain can be made off limits to the battery, so you still technically have 9/10 cells that work fine.
The way a lot of people reuse/recycle/refurb (not sure what the right terminology is in this instance) EV batteries is to test each of the cells themselves, and get rid of the duds, and keep the decent cells. Tesla, for example, all used to use 18650 cells (and I think some models still do), which is the same exact cell that’s in decent name-brand cordless power tools.
When you aren’t required to keep weight, space, and extra circuitry to a minimum, you can really design a system that squeezes every last drop of usefulness out of those cells before they need to be melted down and remade.
So like… do electric car owners just need to buy new batteries? That’s the most expensive part!
Sometimes, but not often. These are mostly 1st gen EV batteries, so they’re pretty old. It’s mentioned in the article that once capacity diminishes to the point of effecting range the old battery is replaced. Old units can be refurbished. These units could also be situations where the car surrounding the battery failed (accident, hail damage, etc) and they decided to scrap it and reclaim the battery.
At one time, they didn’t last more than a few years, and needed expensive replacement. Newer batteries have better BMS controllers on them and last a lot longer. But any damage pretty much necessitates replacement. The batteries can probably be fixed but IDK if they can be put back into use in vehicles then. So there’s plenty of used batteries that can be upgraded to use for stationary storage. You can buy them all day long on certain websites or auctions. It’s a pretty popular thing for DIY solar.
This should make it less expensive if EV owners can sell their old batteries to be turned into a grid battery.
The article mentions that they mostly use batteries from the Nissan Leaf and Honda Clarity. I’m not sure about the latter, but the Nissan Leaf does not have any kind of battery management system. That keeps the battery warm in winter and cool in summer, and helps it last a lot longer. Nearly every major EV on the market does this, but the Leaf is the big exception. It’s also the one car where you’ll see severe range degradation on an older model.
Sure… at roughly the same rate and/or lifespan as someone with a combustion powered car might need to rebuild their engine or transmission. It’s really not that big of a deal, and newer battery chemistries like the current LiFePO packs are continually getting longer and longer lived. BEV battery packs are already expected to last 10 to 20 years.
Engine swap is a few thousand. New battery full swap is close to 20k on a smaller car. Not quite the same.
What an atrociously dangerous planned design.
- Poor design: Thermal runaway is a serious problem that this setup has a very high chance of occurring. When it occurs, not if, it will spread fast from one container to the next and it will not be able to be put out that is the current fire fighting procedure for the state.
- It is very dangerous because these old batteries produce a very toxic and dangerous compounds when in thermal runaway. Again firefighting procedures cover hazmat requirements and it’s well documented the dangerous compounds that are present especially in these older batteries.
Net result. It will create another unstoppable fire that will dump poisons into ground water and the air recklessly endangering anyone down wind.
Solutions not problems:
- Isolate each container in an empty dam that is able to be filled with super chilled salt water the moment a runaway begins.
- Design fire suppression and shutdown to protect residents and the grid. Keep personal onsite to monitor with the authority to immediately react to fire incidents.
Do you think the engineers haven’t thought about that?
Do you think personal safety, firefighting ability, and effects on the environment has informed the design of like… anything in the last 50 years?
“Faster to catch fire, faster to spread, faster to catastrophically fail, more dangerous to life and health, and worse for the environment when it does so” describes anything from modern house construction to vehicle manufacturing.
Priority one is “cheaper”, the rest is just noise.
They actually have not thought of that no. In fact there is a cult like level of ignorance that has already just caused a serious fire & toxic release with this exact same hair brain layout and design. That said the method of fire containment is very new out of the Netherlands I believe.
After hearing jokes about college professors evacuating planes when they hear that their students designed them? Wouldn’t put it past em. Even experts make big mistakes.
This is a way to get off gas as it’s used for reliability and voltage regulation. There’s a few locations running pilots with different energy storage techs like this. One of the main problems with integrating renewables is they aren’t dispatchable generation so you’re basically throwing unknowns in to the system. This is mediated through programs like demand response and load following with gas, but the goal of decommissioning gas and fossils entirely while still providing reliability is hampered because of this gap in capability. Renewables paired with storage would accommodate more less flexible renewables and SMRs, and allow for more electrification of the economy with less climate impact. More electric arc furnaces!
Imagine that box there gets hit by lightning.
Good idea but good luck to the people who will try to take the fire out
Edit: I’m not saying that it’s bad, of course renewable, solar, electric is good. But knowing how horrible electric vehicle fires are to put out, I don’t see a fire of piled up batteries being an easy challenge for firefighters
Batteries and by extension EVs have a much lower risk of catching fire than ICE cars. Stop repeating fossil fuel industry gaslighting.
Lower risk yes, but also harder to put out yes, and also the comparison here isn’t about cars at all.
It still shouldn’t be an issue as long as you place the storage somewhere where the fire can be contained easily, then worst case the whole storage burns down but there wouldn’t be significant collateral damage.
Bring on electric grid storage but don’t delude yourself it’s all sunshine and rainbows. The dangers of lithium nickel cobalt fires and toxic chemical release is very serious with a weird cult like level of ignorance. The actual grid battery fires and subsequent poisioning that’s occurred recently without consideration for the downwind population and groundwater are raising some big red flags.
Current state procedure for putting out lithium nickel cobalt fires. Hazmat gear and let it burn out.
Any energy storage device has risks. In this case the risk is higher, but so is the overall energy storage capability. If you store them off to the side in their own little building, there’s no real risk beyond loss of investment and environmental impacts.
Not to mention, firefighters now have tools to fight these types of fires.
Yeah, a huge tank of oil or natural gas or pile of coal is a total cake walk to extinguish! /s
